


Therapy Plushies

by MaverickWerewolf



Series: Song of the Stars Vore [5]
Category: Nova Refuge, Original Work
Genre: Bromance, Gen, Mutation, Object Vore, Vore, but not the vore you expect, nonsexual vore, vore therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:03:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28888809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaverickWerewolf/pseuds/MaverickWerewolf
Summary: John is slowly realizing that his mutations make him want what Henry has so considerately termed a "stomach buddy." Sadly, one of those is not always available, so Henry presents Shephard with an odd yet practical alternative.
Series: Song of the Stars Vore [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096031
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	Therapy Plushies

“Will you just listen?” Henry snapped.

John had half a mind to put his hands over his ears and start humming, but he didn’t. Instead, he kept sitting there on the edge of his bed, feet flat on the floor in only his socks and his sleep pants and a simple T-shirt – plus his dogtags, since he never left those. And unfortunately, Henry was in here too, pacing all around in front of him wringing his hands and fidgeting.

And John was surrounded by plushies. Well, surrounded was an overstatement. There were two fairly big ones, plus a smaller one.

“Wanna get lunch instead?” John suggested innocently. “I’m starving.”

“Yes yes, I’ve heard all the excuses, the dodges,” Henry rambled, waving one hand as he kept going back and forth. “I’m going to walk you through this in baby steps, Shephard, since you seem incapable of listening for longer than five seconds at a time. Do I have your attention?”

“Look, I already _know_ about the…”

“Second stomach. Pseudowomb.”

John cringed. “I told you, I _hate_ those names,” he said, voice cracking and pitching up oddly because did he _ever_ hate those names.

“You hate _all_ its names,” Henry snapped acidly. “And we can’t _pronounce_ any of the Wrognoth words for it because we’re incapable of mimicking their speech, and none of it translates to English worth a damn, so I’m doing the _best_ I can here, alright? You’ve been even more anxious and withdrawn than usual, Shephard, don’t think any of us haven’t noticed…”

Without even entirely meaning to, John scoffed out a dry laugh and promptly drawled, “Pot calling the kettle black, Henry.”

Henry dismissed with another handwave. “Shut up and listen. You’re worse because, ever since you’ve become this… basin of DNA of almost every known species short of Mahlok – because I swear I think you were part Sarran to begin with with ears like that…”

John made a face, because— “Just get to the point.”

“Alright fine, so it’s _bothering_ you to an extreme now because your body has accepted these mutations so much that even with suppressants, we _can_ _’t_ get rid of those Wrognoth organs inside you now no matter what we do. They’re part of you now, and the instinct comes with it, but since we don’t really know anything about Wrognoth, we don’t know how to _treat_ whatever mental absurdities are filling your head right now, and to make the point simple, we all think it’s starting to drive you crazy.”

John ducked his head – then realized he had and stared at Henry instead. Finally, Henry stopped pacing and turned to face him.

And John made a face at him. “Are you serious?” he said.

“Extremely,” Henry answered flatly and wearily. Then he added, just as flatly, “You want something in your second stomach pouch thing, and I have theories as to why you do and actual Wrognoth never have problems with that, but that’s largely irrelevant…”

Quietly, John squirmed in place on the bed. Then his mind went back around to what Henry had said before and he blurted, “And who’s ‘we?’”

Henry shoved his hands in his pockets. “Me, Andrea, Rivers, Elaine – everyone, whatever, that’s not important, what _is_ important is that I think this will _help_ you and we all came up with this together, so listen—”

“Oom? Is _Oom_ in on this?”

“Will you just _listen?_ ”

“Why should I, _you_ never listen—”

Now it was time for Henry’s voice to end up pitching too high. “Oh my God, Shephard, you’re impossible – you want something alive in there, something living, you want to protect it and swallow it and carry it around, but there’s no line forming to be your – your _stomach buddy_ , so we came up with these.”

Promptly, Henry came over, snatched up one of the slightly larger plushies that was about fourteen or sixteen inches or something, and shoved it under John’s nose. Reflexively, John leaned back away from the proximity of another person, though his death glare ended up fixed on the plushie instead.

“I talked to Elaine especially about this and she put little heartbeat things in these and some of them have other features too. They’re for… baby animals without their parents and things like that, but they’re supposed to imitate the mental – reward, I don’t know, of having another living thing there, like a cat that misses its mom. So now they’re for…”

“Don’t you dare say it,” John cut in.

Henry stared at him from under a cynically heavy brow, his mouth drawn into such a fine line that his lips that were already thin to begin with had become almost invisible. John stared right back, jaw set, his own brow furrowed so sharp and dark over his narrowed eyes that it shadowed them to the point of looking downright dangerous.

“Just,” Henry said as if exhausted, “ _try_ it, Shephard.”

John’s eyes flicked down to the plushie again instead, and he frowned, made an awful face at it, and… took it from him. It was a big, fluffy cat plushie, mostly white and incredibly soft to the touch. For a second, John hesitated – but the moment Henry scoffed loudly in apparent annoyance, John spoke.

“Well do you have to _watch?_ ”

“No, fine, no,” Henry blurted, almost spinning on his heel to look away.

With a sigh, John then opened his mouth and shoved the plushie’s head inside. All it took was for it to touch the back of his throat and he immediately, reflexively, swallowed. Every time he did something like this, it still surprised him how… powerful it was, how all it took was one swallow and the very fuzzy, dry plushie that should have chafed his gullet promptly got pulled inside.

Gulping one more time for good measure, John waited for the thick soft lump to travel the length of his throat, feeling it go down through his chest and… he tried his best to focus, mentally redirect it, make sure it was going to the right place, since his esophagus connected to a working stomach and that – pouch.

That weird pouch that processed air from his lungs to let a living thing stay in there, the ‘second stomach’ that didn’t actually digest and was made for the unique purpose of sheltering other creatures. That his entire body had adapted to, his throat, his jaw, the bones in his chest – everything. It had altered. His jaw had articulation, all the bones protecting his throat had articulation… he could swallow something maybe even bigger than _he_ was, if he tried, like a damn snake, because that organ and even his skin had adapted to make way for and support whatever the thing or things inside him needed.

And apparently, for one species of Natives, that was normal. Lucky him to be the victim of human experiments that ended up giving him the same… ability, as an unpredicted side effect.

The plushie soon squeezed into that not-stomach, as he thought of it sometimes, and he felt it gently push outward from under his skin, stretching for it in a way that always ended up a little stupidly intoxicating. Not in any way other than a strangely gratifying one, like a job well done, not anything kinky. Though, naturally, one of his first questions about Wrognoth pouches were if they were sexual at all – and the question had not just outraged but offended their expert on Native biology, who told him he was lucky a Wrognoth wasn’t here to break his neck for insulting some kind of deep cultural thing.

So… the answer to that was a hard no. Which was fine. That was too weird even for him.

And now he sat here very still, with a plushie in his belly. Well, in his belly, but not in his actual stomach that digested food. The… other stomach that didn’t do a stomach’s work. He could feel its soft, fake heartbeat, and it send a small shiver through him.

He never wanted to admit it, but it did feel a tiny bit better already. Even if he knew something in him still wanted something actually alive in there. It was just so sensitive – all the fur, the plush, the little heartbeat. If it had been alive, he knew he could’ve felt it breathing, its temperature, its every movement…

“I know it’s not perfect, Elaine said it wouldn’t be,” Henry said, since he had turned around and John hadn’t noticed, “but I assume it’s better than nothing.”

John gave a tiny, noncommittal shrug and picked up the other plushie about the size of the first one, turning it over in his hands. “It’s fine,” was all he said, his tone light and sincere.

Henry intoned a small, thoughtful hum and let his gaze wander again. The moment he did, John promptly swallowed that second plushie without any trouble or any hesitation this time. So when Henry looked at him again, John felt pretty caught red-handed. The plushie was gone and the round belly that had formed on his middle was a little bigger than before.

“You _do_ like them,” Henry stated factually, like John was back in that habitat and Henry was having to take care of him and try to learn what he liked and didn’t like and…

John ducked his head again.

“Yeah,” he admitted a little hoarsely, then cleared his throat and tried to play it off as casual as he picked up the last plushie, the relatively small one. “I, ah…” he licked his lips. “Thanks, Henry.”

The next sound Henry made was a smug, triumphant one, as he put on a smile like a cat that had gotten its way. “I knew it. I’m always right, after all – I told Elaine this would work.”

John made a face. “I thought you said it was _her_ idea.”

Henry waved dismissively again. “Yes, well, anyway, enjoy your plushies, Shephard – I have work to tend to, so if you need me, just come and get me. Maybe we can get lunch in a few minutes?”

“Yeah,” John replied, his mind only halfway there. “That sounds great.”

But Henry didn’t go. He stood there, and when John looked at him again, he noticed Henry staring firmly at the bulge that his tight t-shirt barely couldn’t cover completely. Self-consciously, John squirmed again.

“Is it _really_ that bad?” Henry asked quietly. “All this?”

The mutations, that was what he meant. John swallowed and didn’t say a word, though his eyes did flick up to Henry’s face again for half a second.

Apparently, Henry read something on John’s supposedly unreadable face, or at least that was what Henry always liked to tell him. Because Henry just nodded, frowned, and turned toward the door.

“I’ll come by and get you for lunch in a few minutes,” he said, just before he promptly left and shut the door behind him, leaving John sitting on his bed alone in the semidarkness, in the cool dim bluish lights of his room, set on low.

Not that darkness bothered him – he could see perfectly in the dark, lights or not. Why? Because of those mutations. What else did those mutations do? All kinds of things. Sometimes he went crazy. Yeah, he _did_ want to swallow something alive and protect it. Sometimes he wanted to literally eat other people, and not in the arguably nice and cuddly way that he had ‘eaten’ those plushies. Pretty often he wanted to climb on the walls, literally. Build a nest or something, find a mate…

It was all incredibly messed up. And that was even when he _wasn_ _’t_ literally turning into a monster, watching his own skin fall off, growing an impossibly long, bladed tail of spikes that was almost even more articulate than his own hands— spikes, so many _spikes_ , carapace—

John blinked, shook his head. For a second, he had felt it again, the cold in his veins. The restraints on the table.

Instead, he focused on that… heartbeat. The first plushie, that cat, was the only one that had one, a little artificial heart. The other provided a little more weight and a little more substance, which was also welcome. So he turned the last plush over in his hands one more time before he swallowed that one, too.

Then he swung his feet up onto the bed, scooched back, and leaned against the wall, pillow behind him. Hell, this was one of the _nicer_ messed-up things he had now, but it still freaked him out. At least it involved… protecting, not hurting. Everything else involved hurting. Not just pain for him, but especially for others. And not just pain, either, but worse things. Much worse.

Absently, John rested one hand on the belly he now sported. Carefully, he barely pressed down, rubbed it just a little – and it purred at him. With a start, John snorted.

Oh yeah – it was supposed to be a lifelike cat plush, of course it simulated purring. He knew that.

Allowing himself a tiny, almost hysterical little laugh, John leaned back again. Until Henry showed up again around lunchtime, he was pretty content to just… stay here like this.

And, for him, ever being content had become almost an impossibility.


End file.
